Category: Writing

I’m an introvert and suffer from social anxiety. I don’t generally go out of my way to attend events where there are lots of people, especially when I don’t know them. But one of the things I will always do when I […]

I’m an introvert and suffer from social anxiety. I don’t generally go out of my way to attend events where there are lots of people, especially when I don’t know them.

But one of the things I will always do when I can is attending Pride.

This year was my second at Sunshine Coast Pride Festival’s Fair Day as an author, and although it was exhausting, it was also inspiring, humbling and amazing in equal measure.

Now that I’ve recovered from the inevitable introvert hangover that follows from attending an event like this, I wanted to share some thoughts on why Pride events are still important, even though we’re evolving into a (mostly) more open, tolerant and accepting society.

It’s always someone’s first time

I’ve been to a number of Pride events now, and sometimes I forget that for some people, it’s their first time. The sense of wonder and love and joy I saw on the faces of people who told me it was their first ever Pride event was fantastic to see.

I love that I could be some small part of that, chatting to people and encouraging them to go to more, to seek out their ‘tribe’, and to enjoy the feeling of being with people who ‘got’ them.

I think the quote of the day went to a young teen who I overheard talking to her friend about Pride. She said ‘How cool is it to be somewhere and just be, you know, out? It’s amazing!’

Community is important for those who are otherwise isolated

I’ve been ‘out’ now for close to two decades. I’m still working hard to be comfortable in my own skin but for the most part, I’m pretty proud of who I am, and thanks to a supportive and loving family and friends group, I don’t have too many experiences of homophobia in my life anymore.

But talking to people at Pride on the weekend made me realise that there are lots of people for whom being out in their everyday lives poses problems for them.

There are still people who have to hide who they are and not be able to live authentic, healthy, happy, proud lives.

That makes me extremely sad, but for those people, attending Pride events lets them know that they’re not alone. That they have a whole community who accepts them and loves them, just the way they are.

The people you meet are inspiring

Over the course of the day, I met:

A group of superheroes, wearing their chosen Pride flags as capes, (which I was buzzed about being asked to sign), whose enthusiasm rubbed off on me.

It blew my mind when they discovered they’d read my first book, Crush, on Wattpad. They think they fangirled over me – well, it was very much the other way around!

I met a trans woman in her 70s who was attending her first Pride, the joy she felt at finding a loving and accepting community written all over her face. Her eyes lit up as we spoke about what it meant for her to be there, to see a loud, raucous, joyful celebration of diversity that she was now a part of.

Then there was the young trans man who was attending for the first time with his amazing mum, who was so obviously supportive that it made my heart sing.

I was humbled to be able to personalise one of my books for him, the first time he’d had his new name used in that way.

I was encouraged to book a booth at Supanova (where, apparently, it is ‘full of queer kids’), and was offered advice on getting my books into libraries. I met a teacher who asked about working out a way to increase the diversity in her school’s library and classrooms.

And finally, the sheer number of people who stopped by to tell me how wonderful it is that I write the books I do, even though they weren’t my target market, and chatted about life in general, made my day.

And amongst all of that, I managed quick catch-ups with friends I’d met from previous Pride events, which is always a highlight.

Like I said earlier, although events like these are exhausting, once the dust settles and I get to think about it, the joy, the inspiration, the energy of the people I got to meet, it will all stay with me for a long time.

I am excited to be participating in a new blog hop initiated by author A.E. Radley, along with a host of other lesfic authors. I can’t wait to see what topics this blog hop throws up. The first one is Writing my first […]

I am excited to be participating in a new blog hop initiated by author A.E. Radley, along with a host of other lesfic authors. I can’t wait to see what topics this blog hop throws up.

The first one is Writing my first novel.

A great first topic to break the ice with. Plus, it really made me go back and think about what it was like writing my first novel, which one it actually was and how it all came about.

My very first novel, written and published, was Crush, which became the first book in the Girls of Summer series.

It didn’t start out as a novel though. It actually started out as a novella, written only from Tess’s point of view.

My intention with the Girls of Summer books was to make them short and sweet, and in print, on the smaller size. Something you could put in your back pocket and carry with you.

A couple of my Dolly and First Love books – I read these when I was 12-14.

The Dolly romances and Silhouette First Loves books I read in my youth (now I’m showing my age) were small books that were easy to read. I ploughed through them while sitting in the stacks in my school library (I never actually borrowed them – I guess I didn’t want them on my library record for some reason).

I wanted to emulate those books from my youth, but where girls fall for girls.

So, the first iteration of Crush was a 21,000-word novella about Tess meeting and falling for the enigmatic Maddie.

I loved that book so much, and so did my first readers.

I sent it off to a publisher, who got back to me within a few weeks (totally unexpected as they normally take a few months) and said they loved the book and the concept of the Girls of Summer series.

They then dangled the carrot for getting the book into print – if I wanted my book to become a real, live paperback instead of just an ebook, I’d have to increase the word count to their minimum print requirement, which at the time was 40,000 words.

As you can imagine, that was a HUGE ask. It meant doubling the word count and reworking the story entirely.

After long discussions with my first readers, editor and wife, I decided to at least attempt to increase the word count and see what happened. After all, a lot of young adult readers still buy their books in print format, rather than ebooks, so I’d be missing a big chunk of readers if I didn’t get it into print.

And what was the absolute easiest way to double the word count?

To tell the other side of the story, of course.

So I set about writing Maddie’s side of the story and alternated it with Tess’s, which gave me some great new fun scenes and a better insight into the story overall.

There were a LOT of changes (some of the early scenes ended up closer to the end of the book, and some of the later scenes were brought forward, and some scenes I changed from Tess telling them to Maddie), but in the end, I have to say that adding Maddie’s side of the story, while it proved to be a lot of hard work, made it so much better.

After some editing passes to check for continuity (always a major problem with such a huge rewrite), I sent it back off to the publisher with high hopes and waited for them to reply.

And I waited.

And I waited.

And in the end, a couple of days before Christmas, I got the rejection I expected when I first submitted it.

As you can imagine, after getting such great comments the first time around, I was totally unprepared for them to reject the second iteration.

I have no idea why that happened, but it totally shook me.

I spent a few weeks recovering from it and trying to work out what I wanted to do. I knew the story was a lot stronger for the new edits and editions and I struggled with that rejection after putting in so much hard work (at the publisher’s request).

In the end, my wife sat me down and made me realise that my intention was to self-publish my books in the first place and that that was still an option.

So that’s what I did.

I picked myself up off the floor, went through another round of edits, organised the first cover, and learned how to format ebooks and print books and published Crush myself.

And although I sometimes wonder what would have happened had that book been either accepted as it was in its novella form, or picked up after doubling the word count, I wouldn’t change a thing.

I still get to hear from readers of that book (and the others in the series), regardless of how the book made it into the world. And I still get to write what I love.

It’s bloody hard work doing most of it yourself, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

** This post is part of the WLW Author Blog Hop, which includes authors from across the lesfic spectrum. Each post will link to the next author in the series, so you can discover more about them and their books.**

Read how Barbara Winkes’ first NaNoWriMo project became a published novel, and a standalone story turned into seasons of love. Barbara Winkes is the author of 20+lesfic titles, including the Carpenter/Harding thriller series. She lives in Québec, Canada, with her wife. You can read about her first novel here.

I’ve been meaning to get one for years, but today I finally relented and applied for a library card. A few reasons, I suppose. Firstly, libraries are such great resources, and as an author, I should be supporting them much more than […]

I’ve been meaning to get one for years, but today I finally relented and applied for a library card.

A few reasons, I suppose.

Firstly, libraries are such great resources, and as an author, I should be supporting them much more than I have been.

Secondly, I’ve started to sell a few of my ebooks to libraries via Overdrive, so I wanted to check out how it all works. (BTW, my books areavailable via Overdrive, but it depends on your local library’s catalogue, so you may need to ask your local libary to stock them).

The kicker for me, though, was a conversation I had with my wife last week about the cost of entertainment. While we’re not huge spenders, up until the weekend, we had both Netflix and Stan, and I’ve just signed up for a Kindle Unlimited account, because it was cheaper than buying the number of books I was every month.

And while I’m a fan of the subscription model (mostly – though I do wish the amount authors get paid per borrow was more, which is why I don’t have my books in KU at the moment), I realised how differently I tend to seek out the books I want to read since I started using my KU subscription.

The choice is limited, as more and more authors go ‘wide’ and publish on other platforms (Amazon requires exclusivity in order to utilise the KU system).

And a lot of the big-name authors don’t have their books in KU because, I’m assuming, their publishers want sales and not borrows.

Plus, we’re trying to save some money, and although it’s not a whole lot in the grand scheme of things, eveery little bit does count.

So I’m going to read what I’ve borrowed on KU this month and then cancel my subscription.

And then I’m going to start borrowing my ebooks from the library.

I’ve had a quick look at the apps I can access with my new library card, but have to wait until my card arrives to use most of them.

I am a little disappointed to not be able to find an LGBTIQ+ category in the apps I can access so far, and will be interested to see if that’s the case for all of them.

I have some further thoughts on that subject that I think I’ll look at next week, hopefully after I’ve been able to get stuck in to using the apps and borrowing books.

I am curious though as to how many of you have library cards and actively use them? And do you use them for physical books or ebooks? (Did you even know you could access ebooks with your local library card??)

I’m preparing to give my very first author reading in a few weeks, which means I’ve been spitballing ideas on what to talk about that won’t bore the pants off people and maybe, hopefully, even convince them to buy a book or […]

I’m preparing to give my very first author reading in a few weeks, which means I’ve been spitballing ideas on what to talk about that won’t bore the pants off people and maybe, hopefully, even convince them to buy a book or two.

After asking for advice from friends, thinking about the books I write, and reading a good friends brand new blog, I settled on my theme for my pre-reading talk.

Invisibility.

Invisibility is a superpower for those of us who are introverts. It comes in particularly handy for those of us who write in tiny niches, which LGBTIQ YA stories certainly are.

On the one hand, we wish our stories would get much more attention, if not because it would be good to actually make a living wage off our writing, then to be able to reach readers much more easily.

On the other hand, being invisible as an author writing in a tiny niche means almost never having to explain what you write. It means never feeling judged when you get pressed to answer the question ‘what type of YA do you write?’.

Sometimes, when you mention the word ‘lesbian’ in conjuction with being an author, the person you’re talking to jumps right over that assumption barrel and lands on ‘erotica’ – or at the very least, sex scenes.

It can be exhausting explaining that writing lesbian characters, particularly in the young adult genre, does not necessarily equal sex.

So anyway, thinking about this reading, and what I wanted to talk about, I had decided to explain why I choose to write happy lesbian YA fiction.

I’ve been taken to task by some people – not often but often enough – for not writing realistic characters, which essentially means that because my characters suffer no homophobia, have happy endings and have supportive family and friends around them, that I may as well call my books fantasies.

Apart from the fact that I have been lucky enough myself to have a happy ending, have suffered no outwardly bad homophobia that I can think of, and have loving and supportive friends and family, I just think there are other writers out there better positioned to write those darker stories than me.

And that led me to thinking about how authors like me stumble around on the fringes of the publishing industry.

I’m a niche within a niche – a self-published author writing in LGBTIQ YA/children’s fiction, but I don’t write coming out or angsty stories, which is what seems to be currently expected when you add the ‘LGBTIQ’ tag.

While the big publishers are starting to release more fiction in that niche, the authors of those stories still don’t get the huge backing that other authors of more mainstream genres (ie contemporary romance, fantasy, urban fantasy etc) do.

We’re in effect invisible.

Now, being invisible means we get to toil away, writing the stories we want to write without too much pressure being placed on us by publishers to go bigger and better than last time. (Although I do feel a pressure to write the best I possibly can for the readers I have and give them the stories they want to read, but that pressure is internal).

Being invisible also means there’s less chance of copping criticism. Less chance of someone dragging your hard work through the mud, just to take you down a peg or two because you haven’t managed to be inclusive enough.

Seriously. The LGBTIQ fanverse can be brutal – just ask Ruby Rose about what fans thought of her being cast as Batwoman in the upcoming TV series.

So invisibility affords us a get-out-of-jail-free card of sorts. It affords us a fall-back so that we don’t have to step outside of our comfort zone. We don’t have to stick our head above the parapet lest it get bruised or worse, taken clean off.

But invisibility also means that we feel isolated.

Invisibility means we feel like the only gay in the village, when in reality, that’s so often not true.

Invisibility stops us from living our best selves, and from connecting to others like us who will validate us and make us strong enough and confident enough to claim our own unique place in the world.

And so that’s what I’m going to talk about if I get the chance to do my reading next month.

I’m going to talk about how, even though it takes me weeks of mental preparation to talk to a group of people I don’t know, and then days to recover from the stress of it, that it’s important I stick my head up every now and then.

I’m going to talk about the fact that though some people don’t think my stories or my books are realistic, or even any good (which is entirely subjective anyway), that it’s important that I still write them because of those emails and social media messages I get from readers who are just discovering who they are; those who are living in families that aren’t accepting of their sexuality; those readers who have lost friends from coming out; they need my stories.

I know because they’ve told me.

Those readers need something light-hearted and fun, where the characters are accepted for exactly who they are. Where they’re surrounded by supportive friends and family. Where they get a happily ever after.

Those are the books I write. I’m not going to shy away from that anymore.

And I am going to do my damndest to get past my own awkwardness and my own tendency to hide away in order to get those stories to the kids who need them the most.

My wife yelled out “Got’im!” in the middle of the night a few days ago. No, she wasn’t dreaming. I was though, until that moment. She’d been listening to a mouse run around our bedroom until finally, it found the food we’d […]

My wife yelled out “Got’im!” in the middle of the night a few days ago. No, she wasn’t dreaming. I was though, until that moment.

She’d been listening to a mouse run around our bedroom until finally, it found the food we’d left for it in the trap she’d set. She’d heard it go off while I was apparently blissfully unaware until her shouting in her moment of triumph woke me up.

Before I go any further, I should explain we purchased a trap that wouldn’t harm the mouse, so we could release it later, which we did, and that trap forms part of the story below. I just wanted you to know my wife and I are “catch and release” type people as much as we can be. Even with spiders, which I am absolutely afraid of but if we have to have them, I would rather have them outside than in.

Oh, except for flies. We both hate flies.

So how did catching a mouse teach me a lesson about writing?

If you’re part of my Reader Group email list, you’ll know I’ve been struggling with my writing for the last four months. This isn’t unusual for creative people – we can periodically get caught up in depression and depressive episodes, questioning what we’re doing and why, and whether what we do even matters.

Writing is hard when you remind yourself that you’re effectively putting a piece of your heart and soul into each new project and setting if off into the world for people to judge.

It’s easy to lose your self-belief and get stuck in the mire of thinking that what you do doesn’t matter.

Which is part of what I’m going through right now. Among other things, but it’s my mental state that needs some loving right now so that’s what I’m talking about today.

So back to the mouse story.

We’ve known we’ve had a mouse running around our place for at least a few months, but it would disappear for a few days and we’d think it was gone for good, only for it to wake us in the middle of the night rustling through the paperwork in our bedside drawers.

Finally, a few weeks ago, my wife came home from work and informed me she would make a trap to catch the mouse. She’d just need an empty softdrink bottle, some wire, a piece of wood, some books and some food to tempt it with. I wish I’d taken a photo of it, because it was the most un-mousetrappy thing I’ve seen. It would never work.

And then it actually did. The first night we set it, we caught the little sucker.

And then watched as the mouse squeezed through the smallest of gaps to escape.

It then proceeded to spend the night going back and forth, nibbling on the food and then doing whatever the heck it was doing before we provided it with an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Then it vanished again.

(That’s not exactly true – I found a dead mouse drowned in the dogs’ water bowl and assumed it was our mouse – so sad, which is why I didn’t want to add it to the story. Ahem).

Then it turned up again. (A different one, I guess). In the middle of the night, it woke us with its shenanigans, going through our bedside tables, and I finally put my foot down. “We’re buying a mouse trap tomorrow,” I said.

So we did.

I do have a picture of this one:

And this one worked too, hence the start of my story above.

My wife duly released the mouse on her way to work. Apparently after it had gorged itself on the food we’d left in the trap. Which I guess you can’t argue about really.

If you’ve read this far, you’re now wondering how on earth this story relates in any way to writing.

One of the things we did with that mouse was reassessing the tools we had at our disposal. We used what we had ourselves first, to see if that would work. We were almost there with that, but we decided we needed the proper tool for the job to get the best result.

We also didn’t give up and let that mouse run around our house like it owned the place. If we did that, who knew how many extra house guests we’d end up having once the word got out we were apparently happy to have them.

And that’s effectively what I’ve been doing with my writing these last few weeks.

I’ve questioned whether it’s what I want to do, and reminded myself that I actually love it when it’s working.

I then questioned why it’s not working right now and came to the conclusion I’ve not been working on myself or my craft as much as I should have been.

So I upgraded my tools.

I’ve been reading and rereading craft books, fiction books for fun, and motivational books to get me back on track mentally. I’ll share those books and my thoughts on them in future posts for anyone interested.

I have a tonne of story ideas I want to get out of my head and into the world so not writing was never going to be an option anyway.

I’ve also reframed my thinking around my writing and story in general, which I’ll write about in another post.

But for now, I’m going to head off and do some free writing to get back into the habit and then finish reading some books that have been on my TBR pile for far too long.